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Mutant Cinema

An unspooling reel of film reveals a double helix of light and shadow between the rows of sprocket holes. It's the DNA for projections onscreen, duplication of prints, and influence on other pictures. Yet like any genetic code, it must sometimes undergo sudden, unexpected disruptions, and the whole body of cinema shudders in response. Can it adjust to the new behaviors and shapes demanded by mutation, or will it assimilate the aberration into just another mole on its guilty flesh? Whether through the insurgence of a virus, the intervention of gene therapy, or the emergence of necessary adaptations, the body of cinema needs mutations to keep swimming in the bubbling, roiling, primordial soup of media. It needs new skills, new organs, new functions.

It needs mutants!

Since its inception in 1995, Cinematexas has provided a hospitable, diverse and ever-expanding space for mutant media in the Southwest. It has offered to Austin’s hybrid landscape of river valleys, desert and borderland an equally hybrid landscape of locomotive cinema. In today’s era of image proliferation and festival commercialization, we position ourselves less as a festival than a place for contemplation and awe, a spontaneous congregation of visual cartographers, a mobile home for intimate nomads. Join us!